What do you make of our, our dual role as trying to roll out the carpet for these industries while also promising to regulate them fairly?

I think one of the big problems with AI is that people are often talking about three different things at the same time.

So on the one hand, there's AI research, which is the type of stuff somebody like Alan would've done.

Then there are AI tools that can be incredibly useful.

They could be used by big companies, small companies, social enterprises.

And then there's the set of tech companies that are using AI, it's the new frontier, to become the biggest companies that ever existed, and we shouldn't confuse these three things as though they're all the same.

And when you talk about-

Yeah.

Um, what do you make, first of all, of this row that emerged off the back of the budget this week?

Well, there's been a lot of criticism of Minister O'Donovan, and much of that criticism is deserved.

But I see this story as just the latest episode in a decades-long saga about the funding of RTE and public media.

And every time one of these episodes blows up, we get a lot of coverage, we get a lot of political grandstanding.

So who made this decision? Who ordered the flip-flops? But the big core decisions, there's never any action on them, and those decisions are, what kind of public media does Ireland need going into the rest of the twenty-first century, and how should that be funded? And the failure to answer those questions is a political failure.

Only the politicians can make the core decision about will they give funding, and what are we going to have?

You know, maybe I don't even listen to RTE that much."

Yeah, for sure, and people are perfectly entitled to have those views.

Um, is this a regular thing now?

Yeah, this has been noted a lot.

I think the challenge is, you know, it, it's important to recognize when something is not authentic, but also we have to acknowledge that there's a lot of authentic hate and racism as well.

But Ireland is a very small English-speaking country.

We're really at the mercy of very large, um, Anglosphere, and there is a lot of, um, manipulation and hate being driven in the UK and in the US, and then Ireland has become, like, this little focal point within that.

So you can even see people like Elon Musk directing his massive following to Ireland, which he seems to think is a bit like the Shire and needs to be protected from, um, from all these immigrants that are, that are coming in.

So there's this narrative internationally, and Ireland is at the center of it, so it's not surprising at all to me that you would find those accounts originated outside here.

And so, like, what, what about the idea that these are freedom of speech platforms? This is what these kind of content creators argue, that, that, uh, that's what YouTube or, or Twitter give them.

Um, is this a regular thing now?

Yeah, this has been noted a lot.

I think the challenge is, you know, it, it's important to recognize when something is not authentic, but also we have to acknowledge that there's a lot of authentic hate and racism as well.

But Ireland is a very small English-speaking country.

We're really at the mercy of very large, um, Anglosphere, and there is a lot of, um, manipulation and hate being driven in the UK and in the US, and then Ireland has become, like, this little focal point within that.

So you can even see people like Elon Musk directing his massive following to Ireland, which he seems to think is a bit like the Shire and needs to be protected from, um, from all these immigrants that are, that are coming in.

So there's this narrative internationally, and Ireland is at the center of it.

And so, like, what, what about the idea that these are freedom of speech platforms? This is what these kind of content creators argue, that, that, uh, that's what YouTube or, or Twitter give them.

Eileen is associate professor in the School of Communications in DCU, where she's also deputy director of the DCU Institute for Media, Democracy and Society.

Well, coordination can be anything from, like, an individual operating multiple accounts right up to, to nation states who are, have paid state agencies that do this type of stuff.

And people might be more familiar with the term astroturfing, which has been around since the 1980s.

Basically, it's any effort to try and distort people's perception of what ordinary people think.

So we find it in all kinds of online scenarios, in fake reviews for products, in people attacking public figures or endorsing public figures.

It is across the board.

It's just very powerful because we're, we tend to take our cues from other people.

Um, is this a regular thing now?